Helping Business Owners Trim the Fat with The Lean Entrepreneur featuring Brant Cooper

Rob Kosberg: 

Hey, welcome everybody, my name is Rob Kosberg, and I’m really excited to have a great guest to interview, a New York Times bestselling author, Mr. Brant Cooper. Brant is the best-selling author of The Lean Entrepreneur, and a new book that he has out called Disruption Proof. He’s also the CEO of a company called Move The Needle.

With over two decades of experience helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends agile design thinking and lean methodologies to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations. He’s experienced a lot of really cool milestones, IPO acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure, the stuff that all entrepreneurs tend to face. Global keynote speaker, mentor to entrepreneurs, his mission is to teach leaders how to find personal and economic growth through creating new value for humans. Brant, thank you so much for talking with me today!

Brant Cooper:

Thanks so much for having me, Rob. Thank you.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, great to be with you. As always, excited to talk about two paths here.

I want to talk a little bit about your magic. I love what you do.

I love the idea of lean entrepreneurship. I’ve always started my businesses, several multi-million dollar businesses, no IPOs yet, but several multi-million dollar businesses and they were all bootstrapped. Maybe we can start there and talk a little bit about the motivation to get you to go down that path? To write that Lean Entrepreneur book in the first place?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah. So before that, I lived through the dot-com-bubble boom and bust, so in the tech start-up world up in the Silicon Valley area. And that’s where I experienced some of the trials and tribulations, with a little bit of success mixed in as well!

But after the bust, there were many people who were writing about, well, why are we creating start-ups so that they look like big businesses? Because successful start-ups actually operate differently than big businesses. Out of that, I ended up writing the first book, a self-published one called The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Customer Development, and it was the first book to talk about things like lean start-ups and product-market fit. And basically, the idea was not necessarily to bootstrap, but that’s certainly an option, but the word lean really comes from eliminating waste. And it’s a throwback to the Toyota production system. So it described how Toyota was building cars in Japan in the ’50s. And so it’s: “Hey! we’re creating this value for customers, how do we not waste resources and not waste money and not waste time doing that?” And so, the same ideas can be applied to the entrepreneurial world. How do we not waste our time, money for creativity in building products that nobody wants?

And so The Entrepreneur’s guide to customer development and then the Lean Entrepreneur really got into the tactical, here’s how you can run experiments to validate or invalidate your assumptions. Here’s how you test your idea. Here’s how you get to know your customers. And doing all of these things to hone your business in on what will work in the marketplace, thereby reducing the waste that you might otherwise spend.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. Frequently, it’s fun to talk about all the successes and whatnot, but the crushing failures you mentioned in the bio there are often where the greatest lessons are, right? And so is there a connection, a crushing failure to the lean entrepreneurship type methodology?

Brant Cooper:

There is, but I would even say that you can also find those principles in the successful efforts because the successful efforts never started with success. They always started with failure. So, the whole point of the failure is learning from the failure, right? The company that I IPO’d with, I joined it as the IT manager. And within two or three years, they had completely reinvented their entire business model, their products, how they went to market, the technology, everything was new. You could not tell that it was the same company. And so you can imagine that there’s several iterations that happened within that, even that three-year period, to try to find where the sweet spot was. And so even in a successful business, they succeed because they learn from failure. You want to try to do by using some of these techniques to fail small, so you don’t fail big, which is the crushing failure where you go out of business because you didn’t ever figure it out.

Rob Kosberg:

Right. Fail forward fast as I’ve heard it said a number of times. I think John Maxwell might have coined that phrase, or perhaps hijacked it from somebody, I’m not sure which one.

Brant Cooper:

Well, there are no original ideas under the sun. It’s easy for multiple people to come up with the same phrase.

Rob Kosberg:

Well said! Tell me about Disruption Proof. That’s the newest book, a little bit different than The Lean Entrepreneur, but I’m sure some of the same ideas cover both books? Give me an overview of that. Who does that help? How does that work?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, so Disruption Proof is coming out in October. For the last 10 years, I’ve applied these lean entrepreneur types of practices to very large organizations. And talking about many crushing failures, this is really difficult to try to bring an entrepreneurial spirit into these big companies. And so, every step of the way, we learned more. We’re doing workshops that we need to do, we learn to extend that and then we learn to get the leadership involved. Over the last seven years, I believe I have, I won’t be so arrogant as to call it a blueprint, but I have some specific ideas for these companies that want to strengthen their organization, here’s a path they can follow.

Here are the principles that they really need to adopt and spread throughout the company. And so that’s really what Disruption Proof is about. It’s really about how do we empower people to create new value in the world? And drive this permanent change, that will allow these large enterprises, to not only inspire and keep their best employees, but to find revenue growth again and define their place, in really a new age?

Many of these companies are really built upon the industrial age and are structured and managed as if their business is still an extension of the assembly line.

And yet, we’re going through this massive change here from an innovation age, digital age, we’re all running around with computers in our pockets, and it’s fundamentally changing society. What we need to do then is change how we’re managing and structuring these organizations.

And so that’s really what Disruption Proof is about. Create these organizations in such a way that they can handle disruptions like the pandemic or new technological waves.

Suppose you just look at the amazing amount of stuff that goes on a regular basis from the energy grid in Texas, to the insurrection on the Capitol to the Suez Canal now. In that case, these things massively disrupt our businesses. I call this endless disruption. We’re just going to continue to get these waves. So we have to build our companies so that they’re resilient to all of these disruptions. That’s why it’s called Disruption Proof.

It’s about how do we create these resilient organizations in the face of what I think is going to be endless disruptions?

Rob Kosberg:

Love that. It’s interesting when you think of disruption or when I think of disruption, I think of disruptive technologies that come to the forefront and completely destroy, right? Some companies, Netflix destroying and disrupting the video industry and destroying Blockbuster, or the digital camera completely disrupting Kodak as an example. But it sounds like your take on it is more disruptive events that happen, and how we can have such a strong backbone within the business employees that we can handle any of those kinds of tsunamis that come our way. Is that the idea?

Brant Cooper:

That is the idea. I think the technology disruption will also continue. Still, I think that we’re in the digital age. It makes all of these disruptions tied to globalization, because of the power of the computer in our pockets, because of the interconnected nature of all companies. It’s the cliche of the butterfly in the Amazon disrupting something on the other side of the world. You can actually see it now. You can see it happening that these small disruptions that happen somewhere else can actually affect our global supply chains. I think that the technology disruptions will continue, but I think fundamentally, this change from the industrial age to the digital age means that all of the structures of our institutions, education, government, nonprofits, start-ups, and big businesses, are just fundamentally going to change. How we think about these businesses running and how we manage people, also must fundamentally change.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s interesting. Let’s use one of those massive disruptions that I mentioned. Let’s say Blockbuster and Netflix, which is a disruptive technological force, is the idea that maybe there was within the ranks of Blockbuster, many people that saw this Netflix threat coming, but because they didn’t have a culture of great communication, or perhaps there were stifling voices within the organization and internal competition, those concerns never got up to a decision making level? Is that the idea like that right culture can even help against disruptive technology?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, I think that that’s right. What’s interesting, Rob, is that there’s a lot of mythology around those disruptions. And Netflix and Blockbuster are one, but the Kodak in the digital realm is another. The fact of the matter is that the Blockbuster officers did know and took these initiatives to try to go online and try to look at other business models. What’s interesting about it is that it’s not the streaming that broke them. It was the mail-order DVDs that broke them. Which is funny because that’s not really technology disruption at all, right? Mailing out discs is not like this crazy, revolutionary idea. But they tried that as well. There were many C-level activities that went on, including trying to buy the business and selling the business.

And there were a bunch of C-level executive moves that went on, where the wrong bets were made, the wrong moves were made. And so to me, that represents exactly what you’re talking about. It’s the digital age, which means that the arrogance of the top-down decision-maker says: “I know, because I’m at the top of the company, so I’m right,” that is the wrong mentality in the digital age. What you really need is this grassroots level, this ground-up behavior change, where you’re running experiments, and you’re gathering evidence that tells you this particular business model will work. You need hundreds if not 1000s of those experiments running to maybe capture the lightning that will succeed.

And the same exact thing happened with Kodak. Kodak invented digital photography, and they did bring it to market, but they chose a business model that failed. It’s too easy to say that they just missed the boat. In most companies, if you just come up with one idea and try to execute it, you’re going to fail. You have to come up with multiple ideas. There were probably 999 start-ups that also failed and ones that succeeded, right? And so it’s the same sort of thing. You have to run multiple experiments to try to figure out what’s working. And so the empower people part of my subtitle is this idea of agile, and I’m sure you’re familiar with agile practices, but you’re forming these teams, you give them a mission, and then you provide them with authority to go figure out the right way it is to accomplish the mission. And so if you have an organization that is structured around empowering employees to go figure out how to solve problems, listen, we hire these people because they’re smart people, and then we tell them what to do. And so we want to flip that. We want to say, “We’re hiring you smart people, and now I want you to go figure out how to solve this particular problem. That’s your mission.” Instead of the information flowing up, and there’s a bunch of hard work that has to be done to manage that, the hierarchy still exists to a certain extent though it’s way flatter. We have to get the communication horizontally. So it’s still very difficult, but it’s a fundamental change of the way we’re thinking. It’s a fundamentally different mindset than this hierarchical command and control, top-down, you do this. The latter works when we know everything. The former works when we’re facing uncertainty. And that’s the world that we live in. In my opinion, these endless disruptions mean that we face a world that’s increasingly complex and filled with uncertainty, and so we have to work differently.

Rob Kosberg:

I have three kids, two of them are millennials, they’re all three in the workforce. So, one is I think, Zoomer, he’s 20. He’s the baby, and it certainly seems like just from knowing my kids and having employees in their early 20s that there is an expectation that is significantly different from what I’d say my generation had. An expectation on how to approach the corporate culture and what they expect from the corporate culture. Is that a product of the digital age? Is that just something that we’ve seen come along, maybe because of even a rebellion or a transition away from the previous culture that was a little bit more top-down heavy-handed even? What are your thoughts on that?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, I think it probably does change. I think that many people saw this before and wanted to work in this way. I guess, I think that society reaches these different tipping points where suddenly, people with that sort of ethos become the majority, or not the majority, but maybe the largest group within the whole. Then you start seeing these changes. These kids growing up with digital and the amount of information again that they carry around in their pockets fundamentally change that. I’m guessing with your kids, but my kids are certainly at a similar age, they’ve been interacting with people that are strangers on the other side of the world, since they were very young.

The fact is that their social structures are way more complex and global than what we grew up with. And so I think that their synapses are connecting, their neurons are connecting in just completely and fundamentally different ways than ours.

I think the behavior has changed, and the cliche of them wanting to live more experiential lives is part of that. It makes them more entrepreneurial, and I think it means that if they are confident and if they believe that they’re smart people, they want to exercise their intelligence. They are naturally creative people. They’re naturally problem solvers, so they want to figure that stuff out. Of course, it doesn’t mean they won’t make mistakes, but that’s where we get back to that fail forward, fail fast, right? Mistakes are fine, if you’re learning from them and you’re able to iterate quickly in order to find the right way to go.

So, I do think that there’s this sea change, but I guess I’ll also say that the vast majority of leaders that we’ve worked with in some of these big companies are eager, willing, and able to change. They’re able to see that these are the new skills required and can develop empathy and learn how to empower their people, which I’ve struggled with. I think it’s really hard, but you can learn how to do these things. And suddenly, you get this exponential ability of people to create change and drive growth and push new ideas. And it’s pretty exciting.

Rob Kosberg:

And I would say you probably have people who were a lot happier, too, because they feel useful, can exercise their creativity and have more freedom, who doesn’t want that, right? It’s that kind of culture, I would imagine people want to stay a part of and be a part of.

Brant Cooper:

I totally agree with that. And studies have certainly shown that, I alluded to a couple of those studies in my book, people worry about money after they feel like they’re not getting what they want, who they are as a human being out of their job, that’s when they start focusing on the money part of it. The empowerment and the feeling of being inspired and trying to create good in the world and having a role, those things are way more important.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s good. Well, that’s really good advice. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about our different teams. We have our PR department, we have our book launch department, obviously our ghostwriting team, editing, all that. And I’m thinking as you’re talking about, “what do we need to change here? How can we make sure that they’re excited, and bringing their creativity to their job and their role?”

Brant Cooper:

Yeah. And what’s interesting to me is that in this remote world, if you’re not running a virtual company, we talk about briefly that middle managers often struggle in that role, because normally what they think of is one on ones and staying on top of people that report to them. And my advice is to create an agile team out of those people. People can go to agilemanifesto.org to learn about the principles of agile, but it’s really about creating a team where they hold each other accountable. The team isn’t as weak as the weakest link. The team strengthens the weakest link. And they hold each other accountable for the behavior, the culture, and the company’s values without a manager having to stay on top of them.

And one of the things that middle managers always want is to become proactive rather than reactive. And if you actually can get your team to function in a way where they are autonomous and actually accountable. Without micromanagement or staying on top of them, suddenly, if that works, then suddenly middle management becomes proactive. They can start thinking more strategically and ensuring what they’re in charge of, the missions they’re in charge of aligning to your missions, to the company’s mission. Ssuddenly, the managements creativity is unleashed. They become more empowered, and they become more satisfied at work.

Rob Kosberg:

And become disruption proof, as they say. You’ve obviously helped a lot of people with your writing as a best selling author, with your speaking, et cetera, and I obviously love books, I love the kind of impact that they can make on people for just 20 bucks. But what I also like to talk about is the kind of impact they’ve made on the authors that have written them. And so maybe we can switch gears for just a second, Brant, and tell me about your journey as an author. What has authoring these books done for your business, done for your brand? And specifically, does it get you speaking engagements? Have you seen your ability to bring in new clients and all those things change because of this impact that you’re making on others that’s attracting people to you?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the book has done everything for me, the books have done everything for me. Now, the first book that I wrote actually was, I don’t know, a few years out of college, I dropped out and wrote the Great American novel, which was American, but not great. And so it was, I don’t know, 25 years or something after that when I wrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, but I caught that lightning in a bottle, we were in the right place at the right time with a very well defined market segment. People who were mostly start-ups, familiar with Steve Blank’s work and Eric Reese’s work, and many other people who were talking about these types of things. And we treated our book as if it were a business start-up. This is where many entrepreneurs or authors get trapped. Because they view their book as art, rather than as a start-up product. And so back when we did the first book, CreateSpace had just been bought by Amazon, and they were just rolling out Kindle tools. And we self-published it and created a Kindle version, a PDF version, and a print-on-demand version, and we put those in their own separate templates to ensure that the layouts were right for whatever different device that people might read them on. We were one of the first people to put live tweets inside of our book.

That comes from our product background in start-ups. It doesn’t come from authoring. And we even had a SAS style landing page, where we were selling the PDF, where people could buy bundles, buy other tools, and buy a talk from us. The thing about this is that it’s a start-up, and this is a product in the start-up. And so what did that get me? Well, even that first self-published book, got me speaking gigs, paid speaking gigs, speaking gigs around the world, and it got me my first consulting clients. So really just literally launched a new career for me. I’m not exaggerating, it launched a new career for me. And again, so much of it is just me being in the right place at the right time and fortune, I am a fortunate person and privileged in many ways. There’s luck involved. You’ve got to be in the right place at the right time. Timing is everything. And so, we took advantage of that, and then we had publishers coming to us. So the second book I published was with a traditional publishing house. But again, authors make the mistake of thinking that it’s like, oh, well, the publisher, man, that’s like everything’s taken care of for you, right? And it’s like, no!

Rob Kosberg:

Not even close.

Brant Cooper:

They don’t do anything, to be honest.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, the traditional publishing houses expect you to go sell your book.

Brant Cooper:

That’s right! And so we did the exact same thing. We created a promotional video, we had our landing page, and of course, instead of us selling it ourselves, we pushed everything to the bookstores because we had sold the rights. But basically, I spent two years in between the two books, basically re-selling my new book and learning what needed to be in the new book by doing workshops and speaking engagements. So again, it’s very much more like that was the second product of our start-up than it was, oh, I’m authoring a book to a traditional publishing house. The traditional publishing house that’s just your distribution channel inside your start-up, right?

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah.

Brant Cooper:

And so then after that, I published somebody else’s work through my publishing press. And that one was probably a little bit less successful, because I didn’t really have the money to spend on the promotional part, right? And then this next book is through Hachette, and I’m super proud to be picked up by Hachette. So I’m going back to the traditional publishing house, but they really gave me a deal because of the platform I had built doing the other methods. And so it’s brought me clients, it’s brought me speaking gigs, it’s brought me just this ability to meet and continue to meet new people and just continue to learn and figure stuff out. And really, that all creates the fodder for the next book, right?

Rob Kosberg:

Right.

Brant Cooper:

This stuff doesn’t happen inside the building, it doesn’t happen around a conference room table, it actually happens from being out there engaged in the world and experiencing all of the ups and downs and successes and failures, so that, hey, can we codify this stuff? So I just think that I’ve always heard a bunch of people always tell me, oh, I think I have a book in me and I just shake my head because it’s like, yeah, everybody’s got a book in them, but it’s getting it out. Which is really the differentiator. And so, to me, that’s the thing, is like, get the book out, or it’s just talk. And the differentiating part of all of this is that no matter how you do it or what product you end up coming up with, you have to market it, sell it, distribute it, and distribute ityou to do these things. But you have to create the product yourself. You have to go write it down.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah. And that’s easier said than done, as you said. I can’t tell you the number of people that we’ve spoken to, and on a regular basis, on a monthly basis, we probably speak to 300 or so people that apply to work with my company. And I would say the vast majority of those people have been wanting to write a book for more than five years. And these are successful people. These are are not people that are sitting around twiddling their thumbs. But as you said, the proof is in the doing, what it produces is in the doing. I want to go back to one thing you said, and by the way, thank you so much for sharing. It’s so powerful to hear how much your books and your writing have done. Very, very encouraging to people. But one thing you mentioned that, I don’t know if I 100% agree with, but I get it. And that is you talked about the timing, and you said, you were very humble, you said you’re a blessed individual and all that, and I believe that about you, I believe that about me. Sometimes I’m afraid that people find any reason in the world not to write their book, including, “there’s already 1000 books on finance, do I really need to write another book on finance?” Or there’s already 100 books on disruption, or marketing, or corporate culture, fill in the blank. And often, we’ll use an excuse like, “I don’t know if the timing is right” or whatever excuse we can come up with, to never complete the project!

And I certainly don’t think that that’s what you mean by your timing was right. I think that your timing could have been right two years earlier, or maybe two years after or maybe not, but I think you still would be considered a blessed and humble and very positive individual by writing it. Any thoughts on that?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, I agree with you. Listen, I think that I have been blessed and fortunate because the timing actually contributed to the success.

Rob Kosberg:

Right.

Brant Cooper:

I think everybody that has something to say should write a book, absolutely everybody. I think that the number one thing that hurts people is the sort of negative self-editing. And so what you’re talking about there is actually self-editing. And you can always come up with an excuse for self-editing. Even when people start writing the book, they self-edit.

Rob Kosberg:

Yes.

Brant Cooper:

There’s so many editors out there, there’s so many people that can help you to fine-tune your idea, there’s so many people that can help you find the thread through your writing that actually is the nugget! And so my number one advice is to schedule a time, early in the morning is preferable, and do it every day. You write for that hour or those two hours, regardless of whether you have anything to say, you just write, you just get it out, get to a stream of consciousness, it doesn’t matter if it’s not good. The good comes later, the good comes in the editing, the good comes when you get help in actually forming that structure. And then there’s the business aspect of it that I think I already talked about, right?

That’s also just pure hustle. And so to me, maybe that’s where the luck came in, was the hour, I should say I had a co-author, and so actually, not to go off topic, but find yourself a co-author. It’s like, I wrote the book, my partner Patrick was really on the marketing and sales side, but he got to be on the book because he was my partner. And so it’s more like a start-up. Landing on the New York Times bestseller list, that is hard to do. I think that what’s important is that all authors who view this as their start-up venture should be reasonable about what they are trying to achieve. And so not everybody’s going to hit the New York Times bestseller list. And so what is important to you, what are you trying to achieve? If you want to be considered a thought leader, you don’t have to hit the New York Times bestseller list!

Rob Kosberg:

That’s correct.

Brant Cooper:

If you want to gain credibility in your market, you do not have to hit the New York Times bestseller list. Those things help, but they’re not required. And when you go through your traditional publisher at the same time, you do not make money. And so if you’re in it to make money, then self-publish it and market yourself, and market the heck out of it! I just think that the outcomes need to be aligned. And as much as I would love to be able to promise everybody that they’re going to hit a list because they’ve gone ahead and written it, just doesn’t seem reasonable. And it’s not aligned, in my opinion. But I don’t want to dissuade people from writing a book if they’ve got something to say, because they don’t think the timing is right.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, well said. Brant Cooper, love talking to you, love your zeal, both for what you do, as well as for the whole idea of creation and especially how that involves books. Tell us the best place to get in touch with you, your website, where can people get more information about the stuff that you’re doing?

Brant Cooper:

Yeah. I’m Brant Cooper Cooper on all social media. And I really encourage people to reach out to me. I’m happy to chat. Brant@brantcooper.com is my email, and you can learn more about Disruption Proof and even order it. You can pre-order now at all of your favorite retailers, but some special bundles are available at Brantcooper.com.

Rob Kosberg:

Yeah, I saw that if someone wants to even have you come out and speak or things like that, they can buy a certain number of books and get all different, which I love. I love the creativity of that. That’s something that we teach our clients as well to do. And so that’s Brantcooper.com, and you could buy a big enough bundle to have Brant come on over and do a speaking engagement for your corporation, perhaps.

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, I would love to do that. And obviously doing it virtually now, but I can’t wait really to get back to meeting people in person and seeing if I can provide value to them!

Rob Kosberg:

Love it.

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, here’s looking to getting our vaccines out there and getting back to the world, right?

Rob Kosberg:

Love it. Brant, thank you again. Thanks for the interview, it was great getting to know you, my friend.

Brant Cooper:

Yeah, Thank you, Rob. Really appreciate it—great talking to you.